Pattern Opportunities or Distractions?
August 16, 2010
Search platform vendor Endeca unveiled its patterns, attempting to simplify search for professional and entertainment purposes. While the results are impressive, the company might be overdoing things. The patterns were detailed in a Findability.org profile, “Endeca’s Pattern Library” and showcased patterns for ranges, analytics and more. The profile also claimed, “each pattern includes a problem summary, usages, constraints and challenges, solution elements, examples, and links for further reading.” The patterns themselves are similar to skins, helping guide searches. For example, a range finder for a wine search provides range sliders for prices, flavor, vintage and other factors. By whittling down these various options, the search is supposed to be streamlined. However, in novice hands we fear these patterns are little more than novelty interfaces. Sure, you can choose a range of vintage years, but without the prior knowledge to go along with it, these patterns aren’t helping anyone. Search, in our opinion, has not made giant leaps in the last few years. It may be easier to fiddle with interface than deal with the deeper issues of relevance, precision, and recall.
Pat Roland, August 16, 2010
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